[keltex]

It's true, but many people pull all of jquery off google's CDN.

[dmethvin]

Exactly, which makes the size of the file much less critical. It's likely to already be cached on the drive by some previous page, even from another domain. Slicing jQuery core into subset files that are dynamically loaded and other such techniques are unlikely to make things better.

[joechung]

Unless you're on a device, like an iPad or iPhone 3.2, that won't cache jQuery because of its size.